


Like a Lucid Dream

by Knightheart777



Category: Warframe
Genre: Fever Dreams, Gen, Loss, Memories, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:28:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21940453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Knightheart777/pseuds/Knightheart777
Summary: A lone Tenno struggles to separate dreams from reality. Far away in a long-forgotten glen on Earth, a Warframe sits waiting.
Kudos: 8





	Like a Lucid Dream

_Dream, not of what you are…_

Ekata fought back the urge to scream. His eyes were already sore from tears, and he had none left to spend. Sitting amid the carefully tended garden of his quarters, the dull hum of the engines offered him no rest. The statue before him—bronze, of a man in meditation—seemed to mock him with its serenity. In times past, he knew the statue-man’s name, but it escaped him. Everything was escaping him. The Tenno forced his eyes shut, forced himself to block it out. Anything. Anything.

_A hand held mine aboard the Zariman…_

“What do we do if there’s trouble?” a woman asked, looking down at her son. The pair stood before a massive gilded viewport, looking out into the inky void of space. The boy’s eyes were wide with a mix of awe and fear at the ship that drifted just beyond the glass; cold white and opulent gold metals twined together like hands in prayer.

“Stay together, and don’t panic,” the boy replied. He was barely an adolescent, but seemed all the more child-like as he gripped his mother’s sleeve. The ship made port, and unseen mechanisms connected it to the waiting station, linking the station and the golden ship like lovers. The two were swept up in the crowd to board her.

_But it was not their Void devilry…_

A rough hand pushed him down the hallway. It was cold, strong. Not like hers. He fought back the last vestiges of the dream as a pair of Dax led him down towards the nursery, behind the man with the gangly arm. His voice, sonorous and booming, echoed throughout Lua’s gardens and labs by hidden intercoms.

“We know the limits of patience; restraint is a hand that reaches only so far. The enemy have tested that patience, and now will reap the whirlwind like desert winds,” he cooed to the investors, the scientists, the butchers who called themselves loyal Orokin. The Dax put the Tenno once more into the pod, sealing it shut. His heart pounded in his ears as he tried to picture her; the woman who had saved him, or had she made him?

Two faces floated through the dying embers of his consciousness. One was a woman grinning at him from a small precipice, her hair was long and black and her skin dark like his. The other woman stood upon a platform, eyes defiant as she faded into a screaming emerald light. Two women. Both mothers.

_My child, so beautiful to behold…_

Ekata hadn’t realized he’d left the ship. He hadn’t remembered coming to the haunting stillness of Lua’s long-shattered walkways. Ghosts seemed to walk the ways they’d traveled in life, their whispers burdens of accusation against him, against all these void-devils. Had he been here himself, or was this another remnant of the endless, lucid dreams. Silvery groves turned to golden arches, which gave way to a room cradled deep beneath the surface.

Blinking, Ekata thought he felt someone walk past him. He felt a warmness in the air, a stirring in the currents that tossed the dust like specks of grain in a silo. He thought he saw a woman standing beside a table, with a figure of molded metal-flesh laying atop it. Darkness pressed in as Ekata ran towards the phantom of the mother who had made him anew.

_Dream, not of what you are…_

Earth. They stood up there in the green, sprawling wilds that had eons past nursed mankind to the stars. Mind and body were one again, as they had not been for so long. The one felt the other’s calm, felt the other’s resolve and conviction.

“Do you know where you got your name?” a voice asked, indistinct, crossing the gap of time and place. The question hung there as the two-made-one walked feet-deep into a gurgling stream, their steel-flesh feeling the cool water for the first time in so long. “You are Ekata Niza; our dream of peace.”

They fought back a choking sob, bittersweet. They whispered a prayer for forgiveness to the voice that they had to think to remember them. To remember their love.

_But of what you want to be…_


End file.
